


hyalophage

by aliferlia



Category: Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle
Genre: A WEIRD THING I WROTE, Challenge Response, KuroFai Olympics, M/M, [holds fic up to light] hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, it's been six months and my opinion on this fic is still 'hmmmm'
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-02
Updated: 2014-09-02
Packaged: 2018-02-15 22:54:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2246373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aliferlia/pseuds/aliferlia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>KuroFai Olymfics 2014 Team Drama entry for the prompt "quarantine".</p>
            </blockquote>





	hyalophage

Away across the waves was a white city that rose shimmering and fair from the shore. The towers branched out, three times, five, seven, so that the taller among them seemed more like trees than architecture, and the sharpest spires broke cloud. Light moved from one side of the sky to another and dulled at day’s end, but that city never changed. Even at sunset, when the waves showed a reluctant touch of red, its walls shone white as bone. As darkness came, littler lights woke in the windows, more and more each moment: but they never changed or dimmed or died all through the night, only stood stuck still as stars at the water’s edge until morning. An obedient sort of weather balloon hung steady to the east. The sails of boats stood out black against the sky. Overhead, a gull cried out and pulled inland on the wind.

There had been a line of sea-leavings about six metres up the beach that marked the furthest reach of the tide, and scattered here he had found scraps of shell. It had been a half-morning’s work to select the strongest and whittle it down into a wicked hook: a half-morning more to test the twist of red twine he had had by chance had in his pocket, to thread it through the shell-edged eyelet and knot it fast. Midway along the expanse of sheltered white sand was a long outcrop of rock where sea-wrack dried stiff in the sun. This he navigated barefoot and grumbling, flinching from the sting of salt, until he came to a good sheltered spot, bordering on deeper water but blocked from the worst of the waves, which he felt was fit for fishing.

Sand-dunes stood a way beyond the beach, shallow hills whose backs had been rooted black by a thick thatch of tough grass, and it was here in that he left his clothes when he needed to go swimming, and here that he returned when the day’s work was done. There was nothing of stiff changeable breeze he expected around coastlines, nor even the smell of decay. The air in this place was unusually clean and very still, carrying on it only a faint fresh scent he had recognised after several minutes’ concentration as a chemical called chlorine. Even without the need for shelter, he kept to the shadows of the dunes: for set neatly into the sandy slope, all its boards spotty with mildew and its ceiling barely more than six feet high, was a house.

Driftwood there was, and plenty of dry grass for tinder, and he had with him a little naphtha-fuelled lighter from a few worlds back that gave a steady flame. He cooked his three fat fish through without much difficulty, then sat picking at the bones, feeling very thirsty. There was no fresh water , or at least none that he had found. The fish were salty, but they were rich enough in moisture that they would keep him alive a few days more. After that, he would have to work on a new plan. He sat back in the shadow of the house, gnawing at his raw lip, and let his head drop against the door with a dull _clang_. A round window had been riveted into it, rather like a porthole, but double-glazed with some smooth sheeny glass that gave back light like a fish’s dead eye. A bulb blinked beyond it, on and off, on and off, incessant and unkind. It reminded him of a lure.

Aloud, he said, ‘I’m guessing you don’t want any.’

‘I don’t,’ said the door. ‘Thank you for offering! You’re very thoughtful.’

Kurogane gave a grunt: flicked a bone into the sand, narrowed his eyes into the light. It was past noon, he decided, which in this world meant something like another four hours until sunset. The days were short, here, and the nights so long that he could not sleep through them without growing stiff-limbed and restless. ‘Not about thoughtfulness,’ he reminded the door, almost as an afterthought. ‘Wouldn’t want you to starve, is all.’

‘I’ve got plenty of food in here!’ The voice came remarkably clear through the porthole, as though the speaker sat very close, one hand to the glass: but Kurogane did not like to look through it. ‘Water, too - bottles and bottles of it, the kind with bubbles and the kind without. Look, it even comes in different flavours - honey melon, and wolfberry, ooh, and litchi! I’ll be alright, don’t you worry.’ A pause. ‘I’m actually more worried about you, you know. You can’t just eat fish forever.’ Another pause. ‘I could share some of my food with you if you opened the door.’

Kurogane made a noise that was almost a laugh. ‘I’m not that hungry,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders until he was comfortable, keeping his weight set square against the door. Strength he had, and patience he could learn. Hunger he found tolerable: love he did not. He closed his eyes and let out a long slow breath. ‘You stay on your side,’ he suggested, ‘and I’ll stay on mine.’

The voice hesitated, drew a breath and held onto it, before asking, ‘Isn’t that - lonely?’ There came another long pause. Kurogane waited for the wind to blow, for the light to change, for the lone seagull he had seen some hours back to pass overhead: but the air was still, the and the sun was steady, and no birds sang. The only sound was the suck and boom of the waves, blue on the edge of sight as a fading bruise, steady as a sleeper’s breath. ‘Well, if that’s how you’re going to be, then I suppose I can’t force you to change your mind. I do think it would be nice if we could talk a little bit more, is all.’

 _Promise me._ ‘I’m not talking to you when you’re like this.’

‘Like what?’ After a moment’s silence, there came a tapping at the glass, gentle but insistent. ‘When I’m like what, hmm?’

‘Right now you’re a lot like a headache.’ Kurogane gave a yawn. ‘I already said: I’m not talking to you.’

‘Whether or not you talk makes no difference. I have all the time in the world. You, however, have a limited number of fish, and no water.’ There was in that voice a profound compassion. Kurogane recognised it. It spoke at the heart of a hot battle or in the deeps of great pain, a patient and pragmatic tenderness that argued defeat and counselled death. He had spent his life fighting to outwit it. ‘You’ve seen men die of starvation, haven’t you? You remember what that was like, the smell of it, the things they offered to do for a sip of water. Do you think you’ll be able to keep the door closed then?’

The light dimmed and died. The seagull stopped creaking. The temperature dropped ten degrees in ten minutes, but there came with it no change of pressure, nor any taste of seawater on the wind. Stars spoke out one by one in the dusk, brightened over time into a great massy whorl like white sand blown out over black water. If there were constellations to be named among them, Kurogane did not know any. The city on the edge of the sky shone pale through the dark. He counted the windows in those tall towers, memorised the shape and location of each one. The sails of the boats had been lit white now, and lights had appeared in their cabins. Sometimes he counted seventeen, sometimes twelve, but he never saw them move.

Behind him, that tapping came again, and then again. He counted the boats and found fourteen. He closed his eyes and named each of the bright buildings that hung flickering before him. The tapping continued. He set his jaw and waited. After nearly a full hour, the tapping gave way to scrabbling. Long claws tried first the hinges, then the handle. There was no impatience, no frustration, only steady industry. On and on it went, relentless and impersonal. The door shook beneath his shoulders. He settled himself. There came a rattle that nearly jolted him clean away from the house, and then a great _thud!_ at the door, as though something had slammed a fist against it in fury and frustration. He waited. There were nineteen boats across the bay, each one of them sailing stiff and still under the starlight. The sand shifted under his feet. Slowly, slowly, the scratching began again.

The broken skin at his knuckles knocked numb against sand. Under the light of the stars, the bones showed bright as steel. He had not come here by choice.

 

* * *

 

The walls in that place were white under sunlight, but at the sound of footsteps, they flared and woke. A spiralling pattern like a loading loop showed on every flat surface down the length of the narrow side-road, walls and windows, balconies and parapets: five dark dots, red and swelling. A long sweep of colour spread, chameleon-quick, and then a flurry of characters was chasing them all along the walls and down into the darkening alleyway. Somewhere, a siren sounded.

‘I think someone’s trying to get us to slow down,’ Fai said, laughing as he ran, and trailed his fingers along the text that followed them. ‘What do you want to bet this says something like _stop in the name of the law_ or _get out of our town, you dirty miscreants_?’

‘’s what people usually say to us, right?’ Kurogane muttered, throwing a half-grin over his shoulder. There was blood in Fai’s hair, and his lip had been split. The grin faded. The noise of the siren rose. He had to shout: ‘Think we can take ’em?’

‘I don’t know,’ Fai lied, and then added, brightly, ‘Oh, look! A dead end.’

Up ahead, the walls had split. From each had begun to grow, with astonishing regularity, a sheet of some chitinous stuff that spread cell by cell into a barrier. By the time they reached it, stood a good foot higher than their heads and was clear as rain, but from a certain angle it was almost invisible. Kurogane couldn’t break his pace in time, and very nearly stumbled right into it: as it was, he had to fling out a hand to catch himself. There came a long juddering _thud_ , and the sheet showed rash of iridescence, colours blooming dark as bruises before fading. Kurogane rubbed at it, lip curling. He did not think he liked the sort of city whose streets came equipped with emergency blockades.

He said, ‘Think you should go.’

Fai’s face turned hard. He said, ‘You _promised_ me -’

‘I can draw them off,’ Kurogane interrupted. ‘Get the kid, get out. Get somewhere safe. Find me afterwards. You know I’m right.’

The siren whined on. Fai rubbed at his split lip. Kurogane put a hand up to touch it, but Fai flinched back: swallowed, wiped the blood away. That sharp hard severity in his face did not diminish. Kurogane met his gaze and held it. After a long moment, Fai let out a breath.

‘Am I really so annoying that you have to abandon me in the middle of a manhunt?’ he sighed, then rolled his eyes when Kurogane shrugged an unrepentant shoulder. ‘You know, if you wanted some private time, you could have just asked.’

‘You never could take a hint,’ Kurogane said. _You promised_ , Fai had said. _Trust me_ was his only answer. He could not say it aloud. Fresh blood welled up at Fai’s lip, dark in the shadow of the white city. ‘Look,’ he tried, ‘look, of the two of us, you’re the one who -’

The siren stopped.

In the silence, the noise of Fai’s breath came terribly loud and hoarse. He nodded, pressed his lips tight, looked away. Kurogane knelt and locked his fingers. Fai was a familiar weight in his arms: the touch of hands to his shoulders was steady and swift: and then he had dropped neatly down the other side of the barrier, the landing easy and elegant. _Show-off_ , Kurogane thought, and reached out from force of habit to grab Fai’s elbow and haul him back to his side with a grumbled _quit making the rest of us look bad_ : was met instead with glass.

‘Oi!’ he said, and thumped at the barrier with a fist. Fai turned, grey face pulled slightly out of shape, eyes discoloured in the dimness, a half-dead ill-remembered thing. Something faltered in Kurogane’s throat. He said, sharply, ‘I am not burying you here.’

The shape cocked its head. ‘So I won’t die,’ it said, and its words were dim and distorted, but its finger wagged _tap tap tap_ against the glass. ‘You behave yourself until I find you, alright? Promise me. Don’t go being a naughty puppy without me.’

Kurogane made a small half-sound of recognition and relief. ‘I’m kicking your ass for that,’ he said. It may have been a shadow, but it was a shadow he knew. He wanted to match his hand to that hand, to fit their fingers together against the glass as though in leave-taking. He didn’t. There was no need for that crap, he reminded himself, and besides, Fai would only laugh at him. He said, gruffly, ‘Don’t be late.’

Fai laughed anyway. ‘When am I ever late?’

 

* * *

 

He woke with dry lips and swollen tongue, and when he stood his head rang black. He had gone longer on less, he reminded himself, and braced himself against the wooden wall until the dizziness passed. Sunrise was distinctly unspectacular, the light shifting from grey to gold to blue almost half-heartedly, and brought with it no condensation. One palm to the sand, he waited as the earth warmed in perfect synchrony with the air. He tugged black handfuls of grass from the sand and gnawed at their fat white roots. They produced a thick clear milk that was strong and sour, but which he supposed was better than no liquid at all. He lifted an arm to his eyes and stared out at the city. The seagull swung round on its unchanging route, complained. He rubbed sleep from his eyes and set his jaw.

He had already worked his way very carefully around the house, but could see no harm in doing so again. There was no entrance other than the door, of that he was certain: three walls of white sun-worn wood stood on a mildewing foundation of cement, while the fourth had been swallowed by the sand, so that dune-grass grew along the corrugated tin roof and rooted itself into the walls. From one end to the other, it was not more than four paces across, and there were no windows save the one set rusting into the door. He picked at the rust suspiciously. Weathered though it was, he was certain that the house could not be more than a few months old, and the air was not wet enough to cause so much oxidation so quickly. It flaked off scablike and sent up a sharp chemical stink: the metal oozed a little reddish lymph like blood.

He stared.

He turned away and stalked back down the beach. He spent some time searching the shell-line until he found a broad deep abalone, then gathered six or seven round stones and built them into a little pyramid, placed the shell at the centre on a high outcrop of rock, shucked off his shirt and stretched it tight over the construction. Sunburn, he had realised, was not a risk. He picked his way out across the tidal pools and found his favourite spot. He pulled his line from his pocket. He threaded his hook. He cast it into deep water. He waited.

‘Back to fish-catching, I see!’ the voice said, when Kurogane arrived back at the house for lunch. ‘So industrious! You’re very clever about this sort of thing.’

Kurogane swallowed another mouthful. ‘Don’t really have a choice.’

‘I’d be most willing to share my food with you if you opened the door.’

‘No deal.’

He chewed and swallowed, chewed and swallowed, wiped his mouth with the back of his good hand. The fish were very sweet, and surprisingly fat for such cold waters. They were not salmon or yellowtail or spotted mackerel. He had eaten breadfish and done battle with dragonfish and ridden sunfish from hill to rocky hill in times of flood. These were different. They were long and grey and had two fins apiece, round scales, an almost clumsy tail. They looked like a child’s drawing of what a fish ought to be, no substance or specialisation, the idea of a thing. The pile of eyes stared up at him from out the splinters of driftwood. He had never seen anything like these fish before, and he said as much.

‘Well, they’d be cloned, I think,’ the voice agreed. ‘Yes, look, it says so right here in the manual - specially designed to be nutritious, then cloned in bulk. They’re very healthy! It says here they have lots and lots of vitamin C, and high moisture content, and they’re very good for your blood pressure!’ At the porthole there appeared in a white hand what looked like a scarred old tablet, a scientific diagram of a fish on its screen. Kurogane ignored it. The fingers scrolled down, paused, tapped a link. ‘Oh, and their adrenaline receptors are blocked, so they’re docile and don’t startle. Much easier to catch that way.’

Kurogane glared at the eyes. They were round and grey and inoffensive. He could use them as bait tomorrow if he needed to. That was all clones were good for, according to some people. He kicked sand over the eyes and put his face up to the sun instead. His throat was raw with thirst. ‘Eating this stuff won’t - make me like you, will it?’ he checked.

The voice gave a little laugh. ‘You’re trusting me to answer that?’ it asked. It was less incredulous than pleased. ‘For the record, they won’t. That requires a specialised process. Would it be such a bad thing, though? I’m quite happy in here. You could be happy, too!’

‘When have I ever wanted to be like you?’ Kurogane asked, after flicking a bone away into the fire and taking a long moment to choose his words.

The voice was relentless and sweet. It could have been his own, inside his head, pulling his thoughts from his skull as neatly as it pulled words from a page. ‘You want to be like me all the time,’ it said, and Kurogane half expected it to add, _Says so right here in the manual!_ It did not. ‘You think I’m clever. You think I’m strong. You think I’m a better shot than you.’

‘I do not.’

‘You wish your aim was as good as mine,’ the voice corrected him.

Somewhere, beyond the awful sweetness, he thought recognised a familiar teasing smugness that almost made him turn around. He knew what he would see. Instead, he muttered, ‘Like hell I do,’ and tried his best to leave it at that.

The sound of the sea wore on and on. The city rose bright into the air. He wanted to walk across the water and pull it down, wanted to punch his way out through the sky. From the other side of the door, he heard another laugh, soft and familiar, just the same as it always had been. He struggled with a breath and had to close his fist tight around his anger. He felt the pain of a new bruise pushed under a thumb, the drop and pull beneath his breastbone as fingers followed blood: looked out across the sand and saw every shadow sharp with the hard clarity that only came over him after a fight or before a fuck. His throat was thick with more than thirst.

Aloud, he said, ‘That one time, back when we were fighting the God King - years ago, remember, when we got split up from the kids? You made a shot from across a battlefield, pinned a guy clean to a tree without touching him, got the arrow just through the loop of his belt. Most beautiful thing, so neat. You just smiled. Never seen anyone make a shot like that, not even Souma. I thought it was fluke, but then you did it again, and again, and you kept smiling, every time. That was when I started to figure you were dangerous.’

‘What was it like?’ the voice enquired. ‘Thinking I was dangerous, but wanting me all the same? I can’t understand how it would work. Wasn’t it - isn’t it illogical?’

Kurogane gnawed on his lip until the skin broke. He remembered being pushed back and back until his head struck stone and swam, remembered grinning down into a red mouth all hot with blood. He had been shoved down in the dust under the shelter of pines and bitten to breathlessness. He had held that hollow body above his own and pressed his fingers against each wrist and rib-bone, pushed his palms to that skin and felt them slip in sweat, clutched hard at the shoulders in a sudden spasm and clawed them raw. _Most beautiful thing_ , he had thought, seeing in the sunlight that laughing face all streaked with sweat and grime, _the most beautiful thing_ -

He said, ‘What, you don’t know?’

‘No,’ said the voice. ‘No, I don’t.’

He fell asleep before the scratching began, and was jolted awake shortly after dark by a rattling _crash!_ He did not dare look round, but held himself still as the scrabbling grew louder. He was not certain that his strength was any use, not certain that his safety did not depend solely on a pair of straining hinges, and yet he could not bring himself to move away. If there had been desperation in it, any sense of annoyance or distress, any loss of control, he might have borne it better. It grew louder and louder, until it actually hurt his ears, and did not let up until light. He tried to pretend that it was an animal, a rat or a dog in the dark, but all he could remember was that grey city where everything had smelt of smoke. He saw again claws skittering spiderlike to a halt on a banister, saw that single lambent eye staring up at him, the slitted pupil monstrous and full of fear.

‘You’ve done this before,’ the voice said, and it was not human, and it was not whole. It read the thoughts from his head and pulled them into terrible accusations, invented bitter creeping horrors he could not conscience. ‘You always knew I was - sick. You always thought I was wrong. You’ve had to lock me out before.’

Dry-eyed with exhaustion and stiff-necked from the long hours of struggle, Kurogane could not bring himself to argue. He looked out through the dark to those tall towers, remembered the click of the doorknob, the smell of whiskey. He had known a hundred happy cities: why could he never forget that one? He said, wearily, ‘That’s not how it was.’

‘Oh, I think that’s exactly how it was.’ A finger tapped at the glass. That bulb blinked, on and off, on and off. ‘You said it yourself, didn’t you? You’ve always known I was dangerous.’

 

* * *

 

‘I blame you for so much,’ Kurogane muttered. A bullet screamed past his ear, painfully loud, and punctured a wall.

‘I don’t know - I’d say this one’s on you,’ Fai mused, and picked a dart out of the air with two fastidious fingers second before it struck Kurogane’s shoulder. ‘Shame on you, shifting the blame like that! That’s very irresponsible. I told you, you’re supposed to set a good example for future - ah! - future generations.’

Fai ducked and Kurogane turned: put his fist into a man’s face, spun round to meet another attacker with a brief and brutal uppercut, knew from the grunt behind him that Fai had kicked someone’s feet out from under them. ‘How the hell am I the irresponsible one? You won’t even shut up in the middle of a fight!’ he snapped, kneeing someone in the gut.

‘But you see, that’s my cunning plan! If I - oh! - annoy you enough, you’ll get so angry that you - oof! - end up doing most of the work - gah! - for me,’ Fai explained, in between uppercuts. There came the barest breath as he took a blow, and Kurogane braced himself to bear the weight that fell back against his shoulders, felt the swift sudden surge of muscle as Fai gathered his strength and struck back.

‘That’s just ’cause you’re damn lazy,’ Kurogane pointed out. ‘You get yourself killed, I’m not crying over you.’

‘It’s so sweet when you worry about me,’ Fai said, happily. Gunshots flared blinding in the half-dark, and somewhere a siren had started up, but Kurogane’s heart was hammering with a hard harsh glee, and his blood was jumping under his skin. ‘Anyway, no one _said_ you had to come and rescue us,’ Fai went on, and Kurogane grinned wide and wicked: hooked someone up by the collar and swung them round straight into Fai’s waiting fist. ‘In fact, I’m pretty sure I told you to stay indoors.’

Chest heaving, mouth dry, Kurogane met his eyes: said, ‘I had some free time.’

That was when the grenade went off.

 

* * *

 

He could have stayed well clear of the house, but he did not. He could have built his daily fire in the shelter of the dunes away along the cove, or spent all morning in the cool easy water. He could have struck out around the edge of the sand, gone as far as the land could take him, swum the rest of the distance to the city. He did not. He could not risk the door being breached, for one thing: and, for another, the only thing he hated more than that voice behind the door was the silence. He stalked down the slope to the waterline, checked the dew-trap, found that the abalone was not quite so empty as he had expected. It was no more than a few mouthfuls of condensation, but it would keep him alive for another day. Still light-headed with thirst, he palmed a handful of seawater once again, just to make certain, and spat it out. It was not salt. He was not even certain that it was water. He caught his fish. He gathered grass by the handful. He made his way back to the house.

Along the way he tripped over something in the sand. Kneeling down, he scooped aside grass and bits of shell. There was a dark stain deep in the sand, and a few fragments of what he thought at first was old cloth, a grubby brown woven with what looked like the remains of circuitry. Chromatophoric circuits startled and bloomed like bruises under his touch, showing briefly red and gold before swelling at last to an unhealthy purple. He frowned at the stuff for a moment, then, as that stink of chemicals hit his nose, flinched back, flinging the scraps aside. It was not cloth. Very, very carefully, he cleared away the rest of the sand. There were no bones, but after a few minutes of searching, he found a set of fingers.

‘The sea is beautiful, isn’t it?’ the voice asked him a good half-hour later, as he settled in against the door and began his wait. ‘The way the light changes on the waves - it’s the most beautiful thing, isn’t it?’

Kurogane shrugged. He did not like to hear his own words spoken back against him, although he supposed he could not blame the voice. This was how it learnt. He said, ‘It’s just the sea.’

‘Things could have been far worse, you know! At least this is a pretty place. Good for sunbathing!’

Kurogane ignored this. He had not started the fire. He had not bothered to cook the fish. He knew he should, but his lips were sour and sore with thirst, and his gums had swollen from too much salt, and his hands had touched a hand that was not human. ‘You knew all that crap about the fish, right?’ he checked. ‘Don’t suppose you could find out who else comes here?’

‘Well, rich people, I suppose. It’s a vacation resort, or it was, once. People who live in cities all the time like to pretend to escape to the wild, as long as it’s not _too_ wild. So they come to places like this, places specially made for them.’ There came a wistful sigh. ‘It really does look beautiful. I wish I could see more of it.’

Kurogane could imagine the shrug, the lazy smile, the little wink. He stopped imagining. ‘Well, you can’t, so quit wishing.’

‘If you opened the door, I could explore it with you.’

‘And if you shut up about the door, we’d all be a lot happier.’

The seagull shrieked. He found it hard to think of anybody unrolling their towels on the clean plastic sand and lying back under a sun that would not burn them, to think of parents falling asleep under magazines while children splashed through that warm bright unnaturally blue ocean. He remembered a looped bioluminescent light that glowed soft in the mist. He remembered shimmering posters on thin-skinned walls. He remembered slamming the door shut against a volley of bullets, each one landing loud enough to seem like the blow of a truncheon straight to the brain. He had struck the latch again and again, folding it over itself until it could not open, forcing the lock to jam.

‘It makes you angry when I ask that,’ the voice observed.

Kurogane raised his eyebrows at the nearest sand-dune. ‘Little bit, yeah.’

‘Why?’

He shrugged, rubbed at his knuckles. He said, ‘I don’t like it when people ask me to do things I can’t.’

‘Well, why can’t you open the door?’ the voice pressed. It waited a very long time before adding, with what sounded almost like impatience, ‘Are you honestly afraid? Surely a big burly war-hero like yourself wouldn’t be afraid of someone like me?’

‘Never been afraid of you.’

The voice laughed loudly and unkindly, which didn’t make it any less true. ‘Is it just that you don’t trust me, then?’ it asked. ‘There was a time when you didn’t trust me.’

‘Yeah, and I had a damn good reason not to.’

‘You always thought you were better than me. You liked that I was so helpless, that I was broken. You wanted to save me so that you could play the hero. That’s all you care about, isn’t it?’ There was no malice. The accusations were trotted out one by one, mild and matter-of-fact as details of cloned fish and holiday resorts. ‘Don’t worry - it’s a natural result of guilt. You were a violent man, in your youth, because you thought violence built safety. You killed so that you could be a hero, so you could make up for your failure to save people in the past. You thought me pitiful and feeble, and you liked that, because it meant you could save me. It’s logical.’

The fish lay fat and gleaming under the false sunlight. Very slowly, Kurogane said, ‘That’s not how it was.’

The voice waited.

‘I was young,’ Kurogane went on, after a long while. He did not know why he needed to speak it aloud. He had never bothered before. He tried all the same. ‘I was angry. No point pretending I wasn’t. But I never pitied you. I saw -’

He broke off. He remembered the glossy rub of polished mahogany under a hand he had since lost, the scent of whiskey and cigarettes so thick he could smell it still, a lighted stage and the tinny whine of a microphone, a voice he would carry with him into death. That place had been no more real than this, than the water or the sun or that far city. _I was waiting for someone to take me away_. Years had passed since then. He remembered white hands at work over his hurts, tightening screws, loosening rivets, testing the lift and fall of each finger. He had woken in the early light of morning and watched the push of the pulse in the hollow of those wrists, settled his own brown bloodless thumb to the blue vein-shadow and counted each beat. He had nodded off in the backroom of some saloon, drunk and warm and too tired to talk, and found a head on his shoulder, an arm pressed against his own: the brush of hands on a table-top, finger against little finger, warm skin against steel. _I was waiting for someone to take me away_. It all came back to that: that music and that rueful sigh, that single small confession of a long-failed wish to survive. There had been nothing of falsity in that.

‘There was still something left in you,’ he tried. He put his head back against the door, closed his eyes. ‘I didn’t understand why you’d given up. More time to live, a better way to choose, I don’t know what it was, just: there was more, and you were throwing it away, and I didn’t know why. Seeing that made me think maybe I’d also been throwing something away. Maybe there was still something left for me, too.’

‘I can tell when you’re lying, you know,’ the voice remarked, smug and infuriating, as though teasing him for having forgotten to do the laundry. ‘You hate it when people lie to you. You would never lie to someone you loved, would you? I thought you loved me.’

Kurogane said nothing.

‘You don’t, do you?’ the voice said, with a sort of calm triumph, as though it had proven a point through clever logic. ‘You’re too afraid of me. You don’t trust me. You won’t even open this door.’ When it spoke again, it was in a warm low murmur, closely observed, perfectly replicated. ‘If you loved me, you would open the door.’

Kurogane nodded, drew three deep stiff breaths, drove his fist into the sand, was on his feet almost before he could think. He struck out at the porthole, teeth bared, heart all hot and twisted, but there was no one there. The bare bulb blinked and blinked at him. He struck out again, and again, then turned away and kicked viciously at the sand, scuffing up a great spray that streamed away like snow. He would have torn the walls away and broken open the door, but he could not. He was shaking, he found, with anger and with exhaustion. Not even he could live forever on fish and stale air. If he was going to fight his way out, it would have to be soon: and the longer he waited, the weaker he grew. _Promise me_. He remembered a white shadow behind a wall. _Promise me_. He opened his fist. He did not open the door.

The day faded away. Away across the waves, the boats showed their little lights. A faint hum had begun somewhere almost out of earshot. Kurogane trudged back up the sand and sat down: settled his back against the door.

Almost immediately, a great _thud!_ struck his shoulder, louder than any that had come before. He lurched forward, breathing hard, and scrambled to his feet, fists raised and ready to strike out. The hum grew steadily to a whine, until it was loud enough to shake the walls of the house. That _thud!_ came again, and struck a great bulge in the door: whatever was inside had landed hard enough to warp the wood. It seemed to cling there a moment, then ricocheted away, back to buckle the left-hand wall, then the middle of the door, then the roof. The wood gave like fabric and nearly began to fray, showing a deep discoloration. Kurogane stood back, chest heaving: touched one of the bruises and found it wet. He raised his fingers to the light and found them black with blood. The reek of chlorine rose up all around. He remembered those scraps of greying skin, filthy but untouched by rot: remembered the hand sleeping quiet under the grass, a mass of wire and conductive fluid, solar cells glinting in the light.

That whine continued, on and on, never pausing, never drawing breath. It was not made by a human. Nothing here had been.

 

* * *

 

By day the sky above the strange white city was full of birds that sang and gave newscasts and, if they detected despondency in any nearby citizen, told jokes and paid compliments. Long after the sun had set, a faint light still lingered, provided conveniently by the bioluminescence of the buildings. Alone on the eighteenth-storey balcony of their small clean slightly crooked set of rooms, Fai rested narrow wrists against narrow railings and stared out at the evening. One of the shallow ceramic cups this world used for alcohol lay on the nearby chair, still rocking, as though it had only just been set aside. Kurogane picked it up and found it half-full: downed its contents with a grimace, thought it thin unpleasant stuff.

Leaning back against the grey glass door, he said, ‘You’re worried.’

Fai never so much as blinked, only drew in a long slow breath: parted his lips as though planning an answer, pressed them closed again. ‘I am,’ he admitted, finally. ‘We’ve got at least another three days to go, probably more. Something might still happen.’

‘Yeah. _Might_ ,’ Kurogane pointed out. He did not like the feel of the air in this world: though dry, it was thin and very cold, and smelled faintly metallic. Even the glow of the buildings irked him. He had spent years accommodating to constant quick changes in climate, passing from steppe to veldt to forest in the space of weeks, but this world, for all its sweet and clean simplicity, was particularly unkind. ‘Meanwhile, if you don’t get back inside, you _will_ catch your death out here.’

Fai stirred, as though coming out of a long dream: turned, leaned lazily back against the railing, cocked his head. Kurogane raised an eyebrow at him, and Fai laughed. The lights of the city shone shifting in his pale hair, gold to white to blue to rose to gold. Softly, he said, ‘Which one of us is worried now, Kuro-sama?’

Kurogane looked away, face hot. ‘Neither of us is dying here,’ he announced. ‘Not me, not you. We clear on that? I’m not burying you in a world where they have the flappy birds but not the melon ninja.’

Fai laughed again. ‘Good to see you’re keeping your standards high.’

‘It’s pathetic,’ Kurogane muttered: tugged from his pocket the cheap unregistered smartphone they’d bought for entertainment’s sake from a slightly illegal roadside vendor and tossed it irritably into the chair. It let out a disappointed sort of _moop_ and flashed a warning about its warranty not covering damage due to grumpiness. It was white and round and the cracked camera lens was red. Fai had nicknamed it the Mokona Phone. Kurogane did not trust it. ‘It’s also the only thing I’ve even seen enough of in this damn place to judge. I haven’t been outside properly in four days! Four! I’ve been stuck in here playing games! And that stupid flapping bird -’

‘I want you to be safe,’ Fai cut in, with a simplicity that admitted no argument. He waited until Kurogane met his eyes, then pushed himself off the railing and moved quietly into Kurogane’s arms. ‘Promise me you’ll stay inside. Promise me you won’t open the door, not for anyone.’

Kurogane let out a huff of irritation. ‘I’m not stupid.’

Fai only knocked his knuckles against that hard cold wrist, three little taps, one to a syllable: ‘ _Promise me_.’

‘Alright, alright, I promise!’ Kurogane snapped, trying to shrug Fai off and doing a bad job of it, as usual. He resorted to grumbling instead. ‘Babying me - acting like I can’t take care of my own damn self - no respect -’

Fai reached up to straighten Kurogane’s collar, then pressed his palms flat to the fall of his breath. ‘You always do such a good job of looking after us that I never get to look after you, even when you need it,’ he said, softly.

‘That’s because I’m the only one around here with any damn sense,’ Kurogane reminded him. He had thought that he was in the middle of a bad mood, which after spending four days in the same two tiny rooms was permissible, but the weight of Fai’s palms on his chest was warm and quieting, and the scent of him was deeper and sweeter than the taste of metal on the air. He folded his arms around Fai’s waist and put his face against Fai’s hair: kissed his temple, the side of skin just beneath his ear, the edge of his jaw, and at last his lips. ‘If I got into trouble,’ he said, on the back of a shared breath, ‘if I really did, if they tried to detain me or whatever, I’d just get myself out again. You know I would.’

‘You’d have to be very quick about it,’ Fai said, into his mouth, and kissed him again: put his cheek against Kurogane’s shoulder, leaned against him with a laugh. His thumb moved slow and adoring over Kurogane’s collarbone. ‘I’d come and find you first. Can’t do without our only source of sense, now can we?’

‘’s why I’m not going to get into trouble,’ Kurogane agreed, and then reminded himself that he was getting sick of all this sentimentality. ‘Like I said, this is a shitty world. They don’t even have the cupcake match game. What’s the point of a world like that?’

Fai beamed: lifted his face up to Kurogane’s and pushed a brief placatory kiss into the corner of his mouth. ‘Good puppy!’ he said, shifting from languid to electric in barely the space of a breath, which meant that he was probably still worried. In the next moment, he had spun away, leaving Kurogane cold. He reached out to catch him back, but Fai was already at the glass door, and was squinting around the inside of the apartment for Syaoran. ‘We’ll be heading out to stock up on food in a bit,’ he called back over his shoulder. ‘We thought it would be safer after dark. If you’re very good, I’ll bring you back more manga. Deal?’

‘Deal,’ Kurogane agreed, warily. He glared down at the phone in the chair, which was still _moop_ ing sadly to remind him that he had a game in progress, then up at the darkening sky. Lights moved overhead on the backs of fat organic blimps, flashing advertisements for products he did not know in a language he could not read. He wanted to tell Fai to stay, reluctant to see him leave even for half an hour, but did not, because that was ridiculous and he was an adult, albeit one in an inordinately cranky mood who could not step outside for an incredibly stupid reason. Instead, he called, ‘Don’t be late.’

Already inside, Fai turned, one hand on the glass door, his face blurred beyond recognition. ‘Now, Kuro-sama,’ he said, gently, ‘when am I ever late?’

As it happened, he did not come back at all.

 

* * *

 

‘Still keeping yourself alive! It’s really very impressive.’

Kurogane sat back against the door and stretched his legs out into the sand, which was still damp in places with a reddish weep. The walls of the house were bruised, but intact. His lips were dry with thirst, and in several places were swollen with sores. More often than he liked to admit, he had seen a small shadow crawling on the edge of sight, then glanced up in confusion to find that he had imagined it. He had not slept.

‘I’ve been meaning to ask you - how do you know how to catch fish?’ the voice tried.

Kurogane closed his eyes. He was tired of talking. Even so, the memories came back to him. ‘There was a river near the house where I lived when I was young,’ he said, slowly. ‘The women used to tie lines, and I helped, sometimes, when I wasn’t busy with a sword. Lines, and eel-traps woven with willow-branches, and hooks my father carved out of bone. It’s just knots: knots and patience.’ He remembered smooth slippery stone beneath his five-year-old feet as he waded out into a cold brown river before dawn: remembered lying somewhere underneath the moving shadows of strange golden trees and tracing circles in the small of Fai’s back as they compared ice-fishing to trap-fishing, argued over whether a knot they both knew should be called a bowline or a boom hitch. Feeling almost betrayed, he added, ‘I told you already about fishing. I told you already about the river. I told you.’

‘Yes, you probably think you did,’ the voice agreed. ‘And I can see it for myself, but still, it’s nice to chat! If you opened the door we could talk about it more.’

He was not tempted even for a moment. He had seen death by dehydration before, and he had decided that that was not how things were going to end, and so he was not afraid. The decision alone was enough: he knew he would not die here. He did not break his promises, and especially not the ones he made to himself.

‘Yeah, no,’ he managed, and tried to laugh in contempt, which served no purpose other than to start up a long, racking cough. His entire body ached by the end of it, and the city on the edge of the sky hazed briefly out of sight. ‘You never been fishing?’ he grated out, more to keep himself conscious than anything else. ‘Never in your whole - life?’

The voice laughed, so sweet and soft that it set his heart aching. ‘Well, not really, but I have been trained in hunting!’ it sang. ‘Not hunting animals, of course.’

Kurogane let out a noise of disgust. ‘’Course,’ he agreed, and felt the lips that had curled in revulsion crack and bleed. He reached up to wipe them. A pale face with a dark mouth stared up at him through a wall of remembered glass. ‘Hunting things like me, I’m guessing.’

‘Well done! Yes, hunting things like you is my job.’ There came a faint tapping sound, and the lights behind the cracked window changed and flared. ‘Tell me more about this - this country you think you came from. I’m curious - the memories I can see here are so clear, and there are definite patterns of intense emotion connected with them. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this sort of response before! You’re really quite astonishing.’

Sweat stood out thick and cold on his forehead. He was nauseous with hunger, unconscionably weak. ‘I’m going to take you there, one day,’ he said, suddenly and without cause, before he could stop himself. In a moment of weary astonishment, he recognised his own voice. He had heard old soldiers talk this way, sometimes, in the quiet between battles: had heard veterans describe the little farms where they would take their retirement, the children they would return to, all the old small meaningless habits they would recall. ‘Want you to stay with me. Haven’t asked you that yet. Figure you’ll probably just laugh when I do. You laugh at most things I say. Doesn’t matter. I want you to see it, all of it. The trees and the hills and the rivers, everything.’

‘Go on.’

He shook his head. The sunlight was terribly bright. ‘That’s all,’ he said. He licked his cracked lips. ‘I’m not burying you here. I’m burying you there.’

 

* * *

 

They had arrived very early on the morning of what seemed to be a public holiday: the clean shining streets that ran between the skyscrapers were almost entirely deserted, and every second shop they tried was closed. Having made careful enquiries of a kind-looking grandmother with flyaway white hair who had been nodding off in the shade of a tree, Syaoran had promptly been dragged off down a side-street at a tremendous pace, the old woman waving her cane about excitedly and yelling something about a friend who would be happy to buy Syaoran’s supply of jade and rare coral at a good price, no questions asked.

‘That’s probably illegal, isn’t it?’ Fai asked, squinting down the street after them and waving doubtfully at Mokona, who, heedless of any danger, had hopped onto the old woman’s green floral bonnet with great excitement, and seemed not to have surprised her at all.

‘Yup,’ Kurogane said: slung his arm around Fai’s shoulder, kissed his temple briefly and quite as though by accident, then stuck his hands in his pockets and ambled off down the pavement.

‘And are we going to go after them, or…?’

‘Yeah, sure,’ Kurogane said, and yawned. ‘Just. You know. Slowly.’

And so they spent a good two hours wandering the empty city, never straying too far from Syaoran and his enthusiastic abettor in illicit money-changing, Fai clinging all the while to Kurogane’s artificial arm. There was, Kurogane reflected only in his most private moments, a sense of great reassurance in having a constant solid warmth beside him, a strong hand nestled in the crook of his elbow, a palm against his palm. It was less a burden than it was the weight of a trusted shield, and equally comforting: which was, of course, why he described aloud it as everything from _completely unnecessary_ to _probably_ _illegal_ to _fucking annoying_.

Just inside the doorway of the darkened clothing shop where they caught up to Syaoran at last, there grew what looked for all the world like an ornamental fruit-tree in a ceramic pot. From one branch there hung a blue glassy fruit: and from it as they passed there flashed a faint light.

‘Malware detected,’ the tree said, smoothly. ‘Please install antivirus software to protect your unit.’

‘Oh - wait, sorry, what?’ Fai asked, and peeled himself away from Kurogane for a moment, waved a hand at the sensor. ‘Hello? Mr Tree? Are you talking to us?’

‘Leave the damn thing alone,’ Kurogane said, and tugged him back by the edge of his sleeve. The fruit flashed. ‘Tree talks to you, you don’t talk back.’

‘My, my, Kuro-sama is clingy today!’ Fai said, and cuddled his chin onto Kurogane’s shoulder. ‘I’m just trying to make friends! But don’t worry, I know how it is! You can’t bear to be without me even for a second, you need to hold my hand all the time, you can’t sleep if I’m not there - it’s all very touching.’

‘Touching my _ass_ ,’ Kurogane snapped, unthinking, then regretted it deeply when Fai gave a great startled _ha!_ of delight.

‘My favourite pastime!’ he said, sunnily, and suited action to words, which resulted in a lot of scuffling and some indignant squawking. Over at the counter, only half-visible in the dimness of the small empty shop, Syaoran turned around with a sigh of long-suffering patience and lifted his hand in a wave.

‘Hello, Syaoran-kun!’ Fai sang, and then caught sight of the shopkeeper, who had just hefted a great pile of coats onto the counter and seemed to be appraising them, rifling through the flat electronic price-tags clipped to each hem. ‘Oh, and hello, ma’am! Don’t mind us, we’re chronically incorrigible and very embarrassing.’

‘Malware detected,’ the tree said again. ‘Malware detected.’

‘Oh, sorry, it does that,’ the shopkeeper called through a yawn: red-cheeked and clear-eyed, she looked very young and deeply unimpressed at having to work on a holiday. The two intricate braids in her pale hair were a little crooked, as though hastily coiled into place. She did, however, offer Fai the start of a smile. ‘It’s really sensitive to unfamiliar signatures. You’re from out of town, I’m guessing? Your unit probably picked up a harmless little virus, but maybe it’s better not to take the risk. Shopwide system goes down, we can’t get it fixed till the end of the week.’ To Syaoran she added, ‘You’re with them, right? Could you maybe pay in cash?’

‘Is there any other way to pay?’ Syaoran asked, genuinely interested, then blinked when the girl snorted out a laugh. ‘I mean, ah, of course!’

‘Malware detected,’ the tree insisted.

‘Useless piece of crap,’ Kurogane grumbled as they hung back on the threshold: glared at the fruit, which glowed a brighter blue the closer he came. ‘How come it only does that to me?’

‘Maybe you’re just too handsome for the poor thing to handle,’ Fai murmured against his ear, and subtly slid one thumb down the inside of Kurogane’s wrist, pushed a nail against the skin. ‘I have the same problem sometimes.’

Kurogane made a half-hearted attempt at shrugging him away. Fai only clung closer, smirking. Kurogane flicked him on the forehead, but Fai retaliated quite cunningly with a heartfelt sigh, coupled with his classic ploys of wobbling chin and tear-filled eyes. _You’re the worst_ , Kurogane mouthed, and _Thank you!_ Fai mouthed back.

‘Having problems with your unit there, friend?’ the shopkeeper called, sounding rather less friendly than before. Her hand had strayed toward what Kurogane had previously thought a sort of ornament or heirloom, not out of place in a family-run shop and similar to weapons he had known in Nihon: a vast and ancient battle-hammer that hung on the wall just behind the counter, its haft as long as a man’s arm, its heavy head hooked at both ends. ‘Any trouble?’

Fai blinked a moment, then beamed: a little too bright, a little too sharp. ‘No more than usual!’ he said. His fingers had tightened around Kurogane’s. ‘You know how these, ah, these units are! Can’t take them anywhere!’

‘Malware detected.’

And, ‘Unit. The hell? Why am I a unit?’ Kurogane muttered, and reached out and tapped the fruit with one steel finger.

At once the glass glowed an angry gold, and the bark of the tree grew white and stippled: thorns curved up from the rachis of each recoiling leaf. ‘Hazardous malware detected!’ the tree announced. ‘High risk of infection. Please contact your local law enforcement division immediately.’

Fai said, ‘Ah.’

The shopkeeper pushed Syaoran’s pile of coins back across the counter. Her eyes had gone very wide. One hand reaching for her hammer, she said, slowly, ‘I think you’d better leave.’

 

* * *

 

 

He saw first what he wanted most: a long lithe body pressed up hard against glass, a mouth bitten red, sharp hips heavily bruised with the feather-print of fingers. A palm struck the screen and slid in the steam: he saw knuckles curl, and then heard, distinctly, a gasp:

He recognised for the first time in uncountable years that face at once far-off and tremendously clear, as though viewed through the wrong end of a spyglass. He reached out, but his hand struck the barrier hard. He thought, _oh, right, obviously_ , because there must always by necessity be glass, and it was foolish of him to have forgotten. Even through the screen he could see how there grew in Fai’s eyes that fear of curse or contagion. _I don’t want anyone to get hurt because of me._ Narrow fingers spread out across the glass, and he matched his own to them like a shadow: drew closer, until he could feel the chill of the glass against his skin and in his bones. Fai stared back, lips parted, and pushed himself fully up against the barrier, chest straining in urgency to draw breath. Kurogane reached down to take himself in hand: kept his fingers pressed against the glass and watched Fai do the same:

Without transition, without explanation, Fai was heavy atop him and hot, arms linked lazily across his shoulders, skin bare against skin. They were kissing for the comfort of it, all urgency suddenly eased away: as though standing up for a good stretch after a long while waiting cooped-up in the cold, they measured themselves out and eased all each other’s hidden hurts, fitting fully into themselves. He pushed his knee between Fai’s legs and twined their ankles together, put his fingers to the nape of Fai’s neck and drew them down along the length of his spine until Fai gave a soft imploring sigh and surged up over him, kissing him down and down, every motion simple and easy, every sound sincere:

And still the barrier was there, somehow, inevitably, between them. Those eyes were yellow again, somehow slitted and inhuman, and there was a taste of blood in his mouth. Kurogane flinched back, choking, but Fai leaned in, stroking his cheek, and parted his bloody lips. Shards of glass fell sharp between them. He kissed Kurogane again, and it was cold and it was miserable, his fingers bloodless as bone where they bit into Kurogane’s throat. _I don’t want anyone to get hurt_ , he said, and the rain was loud all around them, and the smell of ash and smoke was in his hair, and he had settled one long claw of ragged glass against the inside of Kurogane’s wrist, poised just above the pulse. _It’s not like that, damn you_ , Kurogane said, _you know it’s never been like that_ :

He startled awake with a shout and a shortness of breath, heart tapping sickeningly hard and fast against his chest. Heaving air down in great gulps, he put out a hand to steady himself. It was not yet light. He set about steadying his breath, which was a great deal more difficult than usual while weak and half-starved, but which he managed all the same: stood up gingerly with the intent of taking a swim to clear his mind and realised that he was still hard.

‘Oh, my! Are you alright in there?’ the voice asked from behind him, sweet and amused. ‘Your biometrics are quite - oh.’

Vision wallowing, breath shallow, Kurogane rubbed a hand across his forehead and leaned against the wall. He could feel the blood draining from his face: his lips stung, and the back of his neck dripped with a cold heavy sweat. He could not tell whether he was nauseous with hunger or sick with desire. ‘Leave me alone,’ he said, roughly, to the wrong person, the wrong voice, the wrong face. ‘Go back to sleep, or whatever you do.’

But, ‘Do you miss me?’ the voice asked. ‘If you open the door, I’ll be right there.’

He wanted to pull Fai into his lap and fold those arms close about his neck, wrap his hands around that waist to guide the rise and fall of those hips: wanted to have a hot bath, take a long drink of clean cold water, and put his head in Fai’s lap and sleep. ‘Not interested,’ he gritted out.

The voice laughed, but the sound was strange, somehow: uncertain, almost stilted. ‘I know you. I know what you want,’ it said, as though reading an embarrassing line from a script it struggled to understand. ‘Am I beautiful? Am I frightening? How do I make you feel?’

‘Sick.’

The suck and sigh of the waves sounded loud in the silence. Overhead, the first faint streaks of light had begun to show. A sound of footsteps echoed loud on the other side of the door. Kurogane raised his head, squinted wearily through the window. The yellow bulb stopped blinking. A faint hum faded and died. Before he could draw back from the glass, that face had returned, ghostlike and grey. Its eyes were golden as the sun.

‘Won’t you tell me?’ Fai asked. ‘I can see it in the read-outs, can see all the - all those memories you think you have, all those - all those strange images. I know they can’t be real, I know they’re just because - well, because you’re -’ Here he broke off: licked his lips a moment, dropped his gaze in an astonishingly lifelike performance. ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Tell me what it was like. With him.’

Kurogane closed his eyes. His head was pounding. His mouth was dry. He was not supposed to be the one who waited alone for salvation. He was on the wrong side of the glass. Cracked lips moving bloody against the window pane, he said, ‘It’s nothing to do with you.’

‘I know it already. It’s all right here on the screen for me to read. I just can’t understand it.’

‘Well, you wouldn’t, would you?’

‘No,’ Fai said, and put his hand up to the glass. ‘No, I wouldn’t. After all, I’m not the one who’s infected.’

 

* * *

 

‘There is a - a caste, really, of organic constructs,’ Syaoran said, scrolling slowly down the cheap phone’s screen and reading aloud as he did so. ‘They’re not clones, but they’re not really androids, either. They’re a mix of the two, I think: _artificial flesh embedded with circuitry_ , it says here. They’re public service officials, they’re janitors, they’re political aides. They’re teachers and they’re tour guides and they’re television actors. All units are owned by a central government, but corporations and individuals can hire them from the state.’

‘Your point?’ Kurogane asked. ‘Why were they so afraid of me?’

They had settled themselves in the larger of the two rooms in the small apartment that Syaoran had rented for the fortnight: for this was a building designed for travellers, midway between a lodge and a hotel, that had advertised cheap off-season vacancies available at emergency notice. The suite was shabby but well-scrubbed, supremely unexciting, convenient. Thoroughly unimpressed with the entire endeavour, Kurogane slumped so low on long drab divan that his chin touched his chest, knees knocking the tigerwood table that rocked and stuttered on its three uneven legs. For supper they had eaten a cheap processed foodstuff that was like tofu but tougher, and with it three shallow ceramic bowls of instant soup in some nameless but pleasing flavour: for a treat, pressed upon them free of charge by a fresh-faced shop assistant advertising some sale, there was a paper box of what Fai had identified as wolfberries, and what Syaoran and Kurogane both called goji. He hooked the box toward himself now and set about investigating the remains.

‘There was a disease,’ Syaoran said, by way of answer. His voice was strained. ‘There are all kinds of unsubstantiated rumours about rogue units that go back for over a century - there’s all sorts of conspiracy theories here - but the first documented outbreak of violence was only five or six years ago, this says. Malware, you know, bad code that spread like a virus. It - it turned the units insane. It turned them violent. They killed each other, and then they killed people. Any unit infected with it was scrapped.’

Kurogane flicked a berry into the air and swallowed it down: they were sour things, not too sweet. He had a vague childhood memory of being assured that they were good luck. ‘Scrapped?’ he asked as he chewed.

Syaoran shrugged. The pipes in the walls began to shudder and groan as a tap was turned off. ‘Well, nearly a million people died,’ he said, over the racket of bad plumbing. ‘It’s a national tragedy for them. Everything here is artificial, to a degree, but also alive - even the houses have skin, have those chromatophoric cells they use instead of paint and posters and so on. One outbreak could contaminate entire districts. The government - it, um, it prevents new outbreaks very strictly.’

Over on the other side of the room, in the cramped kitchenette, Fai shook away the last of the suds and reached for a scrap of flannel. His hands were red from the heat of the water. ‘Artificial flesh and circuitry, hmm?’ he asked, slowly, and tapped his fingers against the edge of the sink. ‘That sounds familiar.’

Kurogane glared at him, but Fai gave him a thin smile and turned away, began to dry the dishes with Mokona’s help. It always ended up this way when there had been some threat to Syaoran or to Kurogane. He grew sweet and stiff and vicious, shied away from touch until he had assurance of their safety, desperate to help but still afraid, habitually, indelibly, of making it worse.

Kurogane, when faced with similar prospects, preferred a far less penitent approach, which was why he barked, ‘Look, I don’t _have_ malware! I don’t even know what that _is_!’

‘No,’ Syaoran agreed, ‘no, but I’m willing to bet that because of the arm, you read as an android unit.’

He had stopped scrolling. The phone lay in his lap, the beginnings of a default screensaver beginning to ripple out across the surface in fractals of green and gold. Kurogane glared at it. He was familiar with any number of capacitive technologies from any number of worlds, but had never seen one like this. The screen had felt almost membranous, and had reacted to his touch like a startled chameleon. _Chromatophoric cells_ , Syaoran had said. Kurogane glanced over his shoulder toward the balcony, considered the windowpanes and the far white walls of the thin-skinned city. _Everything here is alive._

‘…obviously, but at the very least, you might confuse the system,’ Syaoran was saying, and Kurogane shook himself, focused his attention. ‘You might flag an error that needed to be followed up, and then their biometrics would show that you were capable of violent emotion. I think that’s what happened in the shop.’

‘This is why I hate computers,’ Kurogane grumbled, then raised his voice, made another attempt at engaging Fai. ‘Didn’t I say I hated computers? Didn’t I say they were nothing but trouble?’

Fai hung up the dishcloth and scooped Mokona onto his shoulder, skipped out from behind the tiny kitchen counter and came to lean on the back of the divan, which was a good start. ‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ he said: offered Kurogane a small conciliatory smile, but made no attempt to hide the worry in his eyes. ‘You liked the games on Doumeki-kun’s phone. Remember that one? The one where you got to be a ninja, except you were murdering poor innocent melons instead of people. You liked that one.’

Kurogane twisted around on the divan until he could tip his head back and fix Fai with a very strict glare. ‘Yes, because I got to be a _ninja_ ,’ he explained: which, somehow, meant _quit worrying_.

‘A healthy and refreshing change from your humdrum daily life, I’m sure,’ Fai murmured, which translated easily as _no_.

‘My _point_ is, games are one thing,’ Kurogane went on with a huff of annoyance, and sat forward, conceding the point for the moment. ‘Robots, that’s another.’ He looked to Syaoran. ‘Hey, kid - how did this place decide they were allowed to build people and then just kill them off as soon as things got messy?’

He realised what he had said a second too late.

‘Sometimes that’s all clones are good for,’ Syaoran replied, his voice so calm that Kurogane had to clench his fist. His eyes, when they met Kurogane’s, were sad and steady as ever. Kurogane set his fist on the table, not knowing how else to show what he wanted to say: some expression of solidarity, an offer of strength. Syaoran smiled at him, at once grateful and compassionate, then cleared his throat. ‘Kurogane-san, I’m sorry, but the fact is that you register as - well, as unhealthily emotional. We’re people to them, but you - you’re an infected unit.’

Kurogane narrowed his eyes, then reached out and caught Syaoran an extremely gentle clip on the ear. That sadness, much too old in his young face, lessened a little, and the boy laughed, ducked away in protest. ‘What kind of son calls his father a _unit_?’ Kurogane muttered, cheeks suddenly hot: but it was worth the embarrassment to see Syaoran’s pleased flush. He looked away, feeling very prickly indeed, and grumbled, ‘Kids these days. No manners, any of you.’

‘It’s a father’s duty to teach his son manners,’ Fai observed, archly, and with a deeper tenderness in his voice than Kurogane could bear to hear. ‘Syaoran-kun here is a model of propriety, I’ll have you know. If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s yours, Kuro-papa.’

‘Papa’s fault,’ Mokona agreed. ‘It’s probably because he’s infected. Unhealthy emotions everywhere!’

‘My emotions are perfectly healthy!’ Kurogane snapped. ‘What kind of crappy tech are these people even using if they can’t work that out? And you two!’ He stabbed a finger at Fai and Mokona. ‘Quit laughing at me!’

‘I solemnly promise never to stop laughing at you,’ Fai told him, softly.

‘If I have unhealthy emotions, they’re because of you!’ Kurogane yelled back.

And Syaoran was snickering, and Mokona was burbling wickedly to herself, and the worry still had not left Fai’s face, but it had at least been joined in equal measure by mischief. He pressed one hand to his heart, affecting deep flattery. ‘Do you know, I think that’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever said to me?’ he crooned, and batted his eyelids disgustingly.

‘We’re not saying Kurogane-san is unhealthy, just that they _think_ he is,’ Syaoran put in, before Kurogane could start throwing things. ‘While we’re here, you should probably stay inside. It’ll be safer for all of us.’

‘Safe is boring,’ Kurogane complained. ‘Haven’t broken a law in four worlds now. Haven’t had a good old-fashioned black eye in six.’

‘He hasn’t done the dishes in ten,’ Mokona put in. ‘Mokona always helps, but Kurogane’s just a dirty-rotten no-good beer-steeling freeloader.’

‘Turning the taps on and off doesn’t count as doing the dishes, you tiny menace.’

‘Freeloader!’

‘Hypocrite!’

Syaoran shook his head fondly and returned to the phone, opening new tabs of information and beginning to read. Fai sank wearily onto the divan beside him: leaned in to listen to some murmured question Kurogane did not catch, shook his head and put his hand briefly to the boy’s cheek, smiled. Kurogane tugged at Mokona’s ears and then fended off a rapid-fire volley of goji berries. Outside, windows began to open all across the darkling walls, each one a lighted eye. There was no safety here.

 

* * *

 

On the fifth day, he fell over. He knelt down, without much hope, to check his dew-trap and find it empty: stood up, found that he could feel the blood pulling itself from his face, found suddenly that he could not see. When he came back to himself, there was sand in his mouth. He sat up, very slowly, and rubbed the sweat from his eyes. He had gone longer than this without water once before and survived. He hadn’t even had the luxury of food then, he reminded himself grimly. His heartbeat slurred thick and fast as water slopping from a bottle. He drew in a breath and held himself still. Perhaps, he admitted, he had not come through worse after all.

Away across the water, the white city quivered and began to dissolve.

He thought, at first, that it was another hallucination, and scrubbed at his forehead in frustration. The vision did not pass. The tallest of the towers was churning like a scrap of cloud under a high wind, and the walls showed a strange reddish glow, as though lit from behind by flame. A plume of smoke went up and up from the centre of the city, blackening to break, and the skin of the air snapped and peeled away. Slowly, slowly, every hall and every house bulged and rippled and fell, fluttering and edged with fire, into the water below. The little boats foundered under the weight of the screen. Through the rent in the air, beams like bones and great struts of steel and sinew showed, together with heavy masses of optical fibre and leaking cables: and a man with a blowtorch, suspended from a swing, who gave a loud yell and had to haul himself up frantically as the sea began to spill out through the slit.

The rise and fall of the waves was undone as the waterline at Kurogane’s feet flagged and sank back, draining away as though someone had pulled a plug in a bathtub. The sand shifted with it, as all around him the world, which was no larger than a long room, began to break. Why they had not simply used force five days ago he could not have said, but clearly it had worked. The sea spilled away through the crack in a roaring flood, and the remnants of the chromatophoric city was borne back on it and tugged away.

Kurogane made his decision.

He did not have the strength to stand. He stood up anyway, and then started to run. His legs shook underneath his weight at every step, but he did not allow himself to falter. _Promise me_. He had kept that promise. He had kept himself alive. He would not break it now. He strode on up the slope, even as the sand beneath his feet began to slip away into the sinkhole left by the sea. He reached the house in the hollow of the dunes. He put his hand to the door. He had battered the lock beyond repair, and it would not come loose now, not without considerable force. There was nothing else for it. Head aching, shoulders straining, vision swamped black with weakness, he raised his hand and curled it into a fist.

Around him, the sky fell apart.

 

* * *

 

Kurogane skidded around a corner and went barrelling through a pile of old cardboard boxes, severely startling a contingent of silver-billed pigeons as he did so. They flew off with a clangour of enamelled wings. He was on his feet again in an instant, charging on and on down alleyways that grew steadily more narrow. The buildings here were not quite so shiningly white, and in places their skin had begun to sag: the semi-conscious concrete beneath showed bright as bone through the occasional ill-scabbed scar, and patches of irrational colour sparked and flared wherever the flesh had taken damage. A section programmed to display a series of playbills, picked out along an alley wall at head-height, had been uniformly corrupted by bad weather, and the images shrank and grew haphazardly as their cells shifted from red to blue to gold.

‘Unidentified unit!’ someone called from behind him, their footsteps echoing on the concrete. ‘Evading arrest is -’

‘A felony, yeah, I heard you the first four times!’ Kurogane yelled, and ducked into a dark opening he assumed was another alleyway.

It was not.

He shouldered his way through a curtain of old sackcloth and stumbled over a series of crates: barged through a pair of ancient glass-fronted doors that marked with words that glowed green in the gloom, and found himself in some echoing chamber. The bioluminescent clusters overhead were triggered, somehow, by his presence, and some of them managed to light up like chandeliers, although more than half seemed to have died from long neglect. They revealed a wide marble foyer: decorative plants spilling wildly from their pots, a front desk whose velvet seats were covered in a layer of dust, several dark doors leading away into the shadows. Organic posters changed and shifted beside each door, one advertising what looked like a tropical jungle, another a snowy steppe, a third a flower-filled valley high in the mountains. Kurogane stared.

Behind him, the doors rattled open, and the woman who had chased him across six blocks without once losing her breath came tumbling down the steps and levelled her long white gun. ‘Move and I drop you,’ she said. ‘I am a licensed law-enforcing unit of Arestor. You are hereby ordered into indefinite detainment and potential incarceration in compliance with Section A, Item 3 of Protocol 375-D. Power down!’

‘Why?’ Kurogane asked, still glancing from door to door. He could barricade himself inside one of them easily enough, he thought, perhaps even draw her in and shut her off, then make a break for it. She had given him a good chase, and indeed had nearly run him down: her eyes as she considered him were calm and clear, free of any violence or cruelty, and her hand on the gun was unshaking. _A good cop_ , he thought. He did not want to have to kill her. ‘I get to know, don’t I?’ he went on, casually as he could, to get her off-guard. ‘And don’t give me crap about sections and protocols. Plain talk: what did I do?’

She never lowered the gun. ‘Your OS has been infected,’ she said. ‘Our instruments have detected the presence of illegal malware. You pose an immediate threat of violence to your peers and to Arestor as a whole.’

‘Posing immediate threats of violence is my job,’ he pointed out, feeling a little affronted. ‘Besides, you attacked my friends back there, while I wasn’t even with them. They didn’t do anything. What kind of shitty police system allows that?’

Her face never so much as flickered: but quite suddenly, her left eye clicked and whirred, like a camera lens refocusing. The back of Kurogane’s neck prickled. The calm he had seen in her was not discipline, was not a detached devotion to duty. It was programmed. ‘We identified them as the owners of an infected unit who failed to surrender their unit into quarantine following the thirty-six-hour grace period,’ the unit said. ‘As such, they are implicated in conspiracy to induce infection.’ She descended the steps very slowly, her long loose hair glittering like snow in the light. ‘They helped you. You are infected. They must be punished. You must be quarantined.’

He spent half a second planning his next move, and then another half thinking _fuck it_. He feinted forward, then flung his left arm up just as she squeezed the trigger. The shot glanced off steel and flew wide into the ceiling. There came a wet _thock!_ from overhead as one of the great clusters of light overhead exploded: a mess of soft tissue rained down, and throughout the entire complex, the lights dimmed and died.

Stumbling through the dark, Kurogane made a dash for the nearest door.

 

* * *

 

In the end his escape was a quiet thing: the door gave in a wet mess of splinters, tendons swinging loose, and the window snapped rather than shattering. He went barrelling out into a bank of blank screens and idling monitors, and only quick thinking and a lifetime’s study of control kept him from crashing clean into them. Sand soughed out after him onto the velvet. He had bitten the inside of his cheek in his haste to escape, and the blood clung sour to his starved tongue and set him retching. Barely able to breathe without nausea, he collapsed onto his knees, coughing painfully, and waited for the dizziness to pass. It did not. He told himself that he was long overdue for a good challenge, and hauled himself back up onto his feet.

The bank of computers afforded him some shelter at least, and, scrubbing sweat from his eyes, he hunkered down behind them, pressed his lips furiously together to lessen the rasp of his breath. Peering out from behind the largest of the monitors, he squinted out at the marble foyer and found it a crime scene. The front door had been cordoned off with long phosphorous strands of what on any other world he would have confidently identified as police tape, but which here he eyed with trepidation. Floodlights laid the floor bare of shadows, and stationed in various corners he counted twelve officials, all wearing hardhats and heavy utility gloves. None of them seemed particularly agitated. He watched one, clearly human, insert a pair of earplugs, while another, clearly not, tapped at the side of its head once or twice, as though turning down a dial. The next moment, there came a loud grating and shifting of gears, and a crash of stone, but no one so much as looked up. This was no longer the centre of activity. Kurogane squinted over his shoulder, through the rags of the door, into that illusory sunlight. From the other side of the sea, the drill whined on and on.

‘I think that’s the last of it, then,’ someone was saying, very close by: a woman, small and demure, her hair caught back in a long black intricate braid. She balanced a tablet in one arm hip, sighed down at it with a little resentful grimace. ‘No, I know, you were right. We should have tunnelled in right at the start. I just thought that a psychological profile of such a violent subject might be useful for further study, that’s all.’

‘Useful for further study,’ another voice mocked, and Kurogane craned his neck around the screens to catch a glimpse of the speaker. She was much younger, a stiff-faced slump-shouldered girl whom he recognised with a sudden shudder: she had wiped blood from the ruin of Fai’s eye in Tokyo and offered him sympathy. ‘Your precious psychological profile cost us five days of negotiating with a defunct unit. You’ve wasted military time.’

‘I did say you were right, you know,’ the first woman replied, and tapped at her tablet, gave a long sigh, smiled very sweetly. ‘Very well, then. Unit YUUI, could you give us a sitrep?’

‘Do we really need one right now?’ the girl interrupted. ‘YUUI, belay that. I’ll review your memory at a later stage.’

‘As you wish,’ said a voice.

Kurogane actually flinched at the sound of it, gripped hard at the edge of the screen, had to force himself to risk a further glance. Standing by with eyes politely downcast, hands folded at the small of a thin straight back after the fashion of a well-schooled soldier, was Fai: or something very like him, something that was at once as tall and lovely and far stiller and more strange. Its hair hung loose, quite unlike the coiled braids favoured by humans, and its long white hands were tipped with longer whiter talons. Its eyes were vividly, viciously gold.

‘May I take my leave and report back to base?’ it asked the girl.

She stared, as though a stone had suddenly stood up and asked to join a conversation. ‘No,’ she said, ‘you may not. You’re still on duty, and I want you on hand in case the extraction goes wrong. Idle if you must, but -’

Somewhere, something exploded. The floor shook. The edge of the screen beneath Kurogane’s hand slipped, and knocked loose one of the struts that supported the entire array. He stumbled back, hoping to minimise the damage, but his legs were clumsy, and his hands were heavy, and he blundered straight into the nearest monitor. The rest went down like dominoes. He stood, ears ringing, as every eye in the room turned to see him standing, alone and unarmed, in the ruins of his prison. The older woman gasped, two spots of red appearing on her face in fear or excitement. For a moment it was very, very funny.

Then, ‘I hate my job,’ the girl said, blankly, and raised a gun.

Kurogane ran.

Twelve officers, any other day, would have made for a good warm-up round. _Just a brisk war before breakfast,_ Fai would say, rolling his eyes fondly, _and then a good healthy gang rumble or three before lunch - that’s your version of a lazy morning_. Keeping the memory of that voice fixed in his mind, forgetting all he could of the copy behind him, Kurogane hurled himself straight for what looked like a stairwell set into the side of the wall: crashed through a beaded curtain that glowed and sang a feeble welcoming jingle at his touch, went staggering up and up into the dark.

The first door he found had been cordoned off with bands of that same phosphorescent tape, glowing blueish and baleful, but he kicked the strands aside impatiently. The result was an electrical jolt hard enough to set his teeth chattering. He sagged to his knees, but there were already footsteps behind him, and he could not stop. He risked a single backward glance, saw only those golden eyes blazing in the shadows, those talons rattling sharp on the balustrade. He reached out to his left and found a doorknob: took hard hold and wrenched the entire door from its bony sockets, heaved it back down the stairs without a glance and loped on through what turned out to be a narrow passageway. Behind him, a voice like Fai’s gave a scream. He pressed on.

He came out soon enough into a dim-lit landing where windows opened onto what must once have been a spectacular view of the city. Something about the oily sheen they leant to the moonlight was familiar: after a beat, he recognised with loathing that nacreous chitin that had cut him off from Fai. He hurtled on without pause, stepping from shadow to shadow, never looking back. His teeth still ached in his skull from the shock, and his heart was skipping. He heard a faint scuffle somewhere to his right, and swung round, vaguely aware of a living presence. The next moment, something crashed into him, hard. He gave a roar, struck out with a furious fist to strike at his assailant: who ducked, neatly, and took hold of his arm with a firm friendly grip.

Even through his dizziness and disorientation, Kurogane knew that presence. The next moment, their momentum had carried them out of the shadows and into a beam of moonlight that filtered grey through a grimy window, Syaoran’s brown eyes were blinking up at him, wide with worry. ‘Kid!’ Kurogane said, breathless: put a hand to the back of Syaoran’s neck and drew him in against his shoulder for a moment, gave him a little wordless shake. ‘You took your time! The hell have you been?’

‘Sorry,’ Syaoran said, still staring up at him anxiously. ‘Are you - are you alright? You look -’

‘I’m good,’ Kurogane said: added, in the interests of honesty, ‘Haven’t eaten much, but I’ll tell you when that starts being a problem,’ and released him. He scrubbed a hand through Syaoran’s hair, just rough enough to seem uncaring, and grinned when the boy beamed up at him. ‘You?’

‘We’re fine. Just worried.’

‘Because Kurogane is _irresponsible_ ,’ Mokona muttered sullenly from somewhere inside Syaoran’s jacket. ‘Because Kurogane is a _terrible father_.’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don’t need to hear that from you,’ Kurogane snapped, still heaving to draw breath, barely able to keep himself upright. He jerked his head down the passageway, broke into a run that Syaoran followed willingly enough. ‘You on your own?’

Syaoran shook his head. ‘I got split up from Fai-san back there,’ he said, carefully tucking Mokona’s ears back inside his jacket as their pace quickened to a sprint. ‘We need to regroup and get out before things get - exciting. I think that last explosion was probably him.’

That was good news. ‘Not a real party without explosions,’ Kurogane grunted, feeling rather flattered. The walkway stretched on and on, clearly a vast observation deck that seemed to ring the complex round with no end in sight. He hitched his shoulders, displeased by the brightness of the moonlight and the open stretch of carpeting before him: glanced around, hoping to see side-doors, and found none.

‘I can’t take you two anywhere,’ Syaoran huffed as he ran: seemed to pick up on Kurogane’s discomfort, threw a hurried glance over his shoulder. ‘Any police units around here we should watch out for? Those things are dangerous.’

Kurogane kept his face very steady. His lungs felt flat, and he could barely keep himself from pitching headfirst into a faint. His legs felt like wet paper. ‘Just one.’

‘You know how to take them out, right?’ Syaoran checked. ‘They’re much stronger than we are. Some of the newest military models can exert up to twenty times as much force as a human, and are a lot faster, too. Direct combat isn’t the way.’

For quite probably the first time in his life, Kurogane was happy to hear it. He nearly laughed, but his head was pounding, and his face felt numb and cold, and as soon as he stopped moving his body would remember that it was half-starved and wholly parched. _Promise me_. He could not take another step. _I’m not burying you here_. He kept going. Aloud, he scoffed, and said, ‘Huh! Boring,’ specifically so that Mokona could mumble something disapproving about his being _so violent!_ ‘How then?’

‘Took us a while to find out, but they do have a weak spot,’ Syaoran announced, quite proudly. ‘Each model has an emergency killswitch behind their - ah! Fai-san! Over here!’

A number of things happened very quickly. Kurogane looked up, his heart suddenly still as stone. A shadow crossed the wide length of light in front of them. Something passed before him in a swift soundless blur, something fair and faceless as a ghost in the grey moonlight, something that carried blades in place of bone. The relief in Syaoran’s face faltered, and his eyes went very wide. There came a great ruckling noise like a peal of thunder as a pane was torn from the window: and then a sheet of chitin came spinning toward them out of the dark, catching Syaoran a great blow in the stomach and knocking him back into the wall, which promptly collapsed.

‘Error log: human endangerment,’ said the unit. ‘Collateral damage.’

‘Don’t you _touch_ him!’ Kurogane screamed, or thought he did. He could not remember, afterward. A heavy black fury sank into him and shoved him forward, striking his legs to sprint, his hands to strangle. The unit did not startle: the unit did not smile. It raised one slender sharpened hand, almost as though disinterested, and struck out at Kurogane, faster than sight. Kurogane closed his eyes and dodged. Steel knuckles met skin and glanced back with a _clang!_ unlike anything he had ever heard. The unit caught him a blow on the cheek that actually shut off his thought for half a second. He choked on blood and struck again. The unit whirred and hissed and fell back.

‘It’s very impressive, the arm,’ that voice said, sweet and insidious, so closely known and so strange. ‘A custom upgrade, we’re assuming, or else specially commissioned and the reference data expunged. You’re _very_ illegal, you know.’

Jaw red with agony, throat thick with blood, Kurogane spat out a tooth. ‘Breaking laws is a bad habit of mine.’

The unit spun forward and struck again. Kurogane lifted his arm and parried. The weight of the blow was like a boulder. Still he withstood it: kicked the unit’s legs out from under it and turned a bloody grin on it when it fell. It promptly drove its fist toward Kurogane’s knee. If he had not twisted aside in time, the patella would have shattered: as it was, the blow struck home in the meat of his thigh with a pain so great that he collapsed. The unit was on him in an instant, thumbs seeking out the swell of his throat, hands locking hard around his neck.

It bore down on him, heavier than he could have imagined, and even the press of that chest against his own was familiar, the sharpness of those shoulder-blades so well known that he reached up automatically to cup them, gently, in his palms. _Promise me_ , Fai had said. This was the wrong face, these the wrong arms. _I’m not burying you here_.

‘Did you enjoy yourself in there?’ the unit asked, pleasantly. ‘This used to be one of the most famous vacation resorts in the city! Until, you know, the plague broke out. Terrible accidents all over the place. Somuch unpleasantness! So many businesses had to shut down because of - incidents. Still, everything seems to be in good working order! I’m only sorry I couldn’t have a look around with you.’

Kurogane remembered that knot of bones in the sand, those scraps of slippery half-real skin. Whatever had happened, someone had done a bad job of cleaning it up. He did not care to know any more than that. There was no rage in those terrible yellow eyes that bored down into his, no fury in that soft face: only an endless sweetness that struck at Kurogane’s heart like steel, and a cloud of bright hair in the moonlight. ‘You never had any incidents?’ he managed to choke out. ‘You never did anything - violent? Anything - anything you weren’t - programmed to?’

‘Now, now, are you trying to cast aspersions on my spotless reputation?’ the unit asked. A protocol produced a perfect laugh. Kurogane felt sick with hatred. ‘That’s very impolite. I’m a prototype, you know - quite an important one, in fact! I was built to hunt down things like you, infected things, poor sick insane things. I was made to think like you, to understand the things you feel, but I’m not corrupt. I’m not unclean. I’m nothing like you.’

Kurogane nodded. The thumbs tightened around his throat. Talons pricked his skin. ‘Then kill me,’ he managed, in a hoarse gasp. ‘That’s your job, right? That’s what - that’s what you were built to do, right? So quit talking about killing me and kill me.’

The unit’s eyes flickered a moment, the pupils rotating and refocusing. Its lips parted, just briefly. Kurogane knew those eyes. He knew that face. He had kissed that mouth half a million times, more. He knew the shape of this body and the strength of those hands. They had put their backs together hot and heaving at the heart of a hundred fights and cut arrows down out of the air, had moved against each other in the dark and borrowed breath from each other’s mouths. He looked up into those eyes with desolation.

‘You’re infected,’ the unit repeated, but its hands were still and its words were strange. ‘You’re a quarantined unit. You’re scrap.’

‘So kill me,’ Kurogane insisted, all fury spent: because he was sure, now, sure as he had never been before. ‘Do it.’

The unit made a stiff, abortive gesture. Its eyes blazed in the dark. It opened its mouth. It said, ‘I don’t want -’

A long thin spill of magic scrolled out onto the night air, and the windows exploded in a shock of sound. Operating entirely on instinct, Kurogane drew the unit into his arms, put a hand up to cover its head, clutched it close: but something slipped through his fingers, too quick even for him to catch, and pierced the unit’s neck.

Shouldering his way through the last of the living glass came Fai.

 

* * *

 

Bleeding heavily from a gash to the cheek, sloughing shards from his skin like ice, he hopped down from the windowsill and crossed very calmly to where Syaoran lay struggling. His lip curled as he saw the blood on the boy’s cheek, and he stooped, set shoulder to steel. He strained a moment, then lifted the sheet clean off, shoved it away. Syaoran crawled free, hissing in pain, and Fai caught at his arms to steady him, helped him to his feet. He cupped Syaoran’s face, lifted it carefully up to the light the better to examine the bruising, asked an urgent question. Syaoran shook his head, gave Fai a little smile. Fai let out a breath of relief, ruffled a hand through Syaoran’s hair, spoke some word that made the boy laugh.

Something in Kurogane’s chest broke open and reached out, yearning for comfort: and as though he had been called aloud by name, Fai turned. Their eyes met, and some invisible chain snapped up taut between them, pulling hot at their hearts. There was no world where they could ever be anything but this, no world where either could ever kill the other: no timeline where, once they had met, they could ever be buried alone. The unit lay still in Kurogane’s arms, a sharp stink of chlorine rising up from the bolt of steel that had punctured its neck. It was without help. It was dead.

He said, ‘You’re late.’

**Author's Note:**

> See [notes](http://ereshkigali.dreamwidth.org/3091.html) at my dreamwidth.


End file.
